Today’s guest blog post is from Dan Coomes, creator of The College Potential Calculator. I asked Dan to give us an idea of how his calculator works and how it can benefit both parents and students in the college search and the search for scholarships. It’s an excellent tool to narrow down the college and scholarship search process. For those of you wanting to make the best use of your time this summer, you should check out the College Potential Calculator.

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What is a high school graduate’s biggest deterrent to getting into a top college or obtaining a scholarship? According to a recent survey of high school counselors, it is a student’s “lack of initiative or simply starting too late in the process.” In fact, 22% of the counselors surveyed reported that high school seniors are either too overwhelmed or simply don’t make the time to sit down and apply for scholarships. They think their grades either aren’t high enough or they can’t write a compelling enough story about themselves, so why waste the time?

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) at the US Department of Education, only about 10.6% of students, or about 1 in 10, received scholarships worth an average of $2,815 in 2007-08. This leads to tight competition and let’s face it, $2,800 isn’t going to go vary far when the average annual prices for undergraduate tuition, room, and board were estimated to be $11,578 at public institutions and $29,915 at private institutions for the 2007-08 school year.

So what can you do to stay competitive and attempt to reduce wasting time on scholarships that won’t pay that much? Dan Coomes, one of the surveyors and creator of The College Potential Calculator, has a few non-traditional tips for students and parents looking for an extra edge this summer:

• Know what your intended field of study is going to be: Most students, parents, and counselors I’ve talked to believe that minority status or being able to demonstrate financial need is the biggest factor in obtaining a scholarship. While being able to demonstrate need is an important factor, a student’s minority status is only applicable to approximately 9% of the scholarships listed in our Calculator. That means there’s 1,800 other scholarships out there that don’t have a minority status requirement. Selecting a field of study and being able to write about it is far more important than minority status, representing approximately 48% of the scholarships in the College Potential Calculator. Engineering and engineering technology is one of the most represented intended fields of study, capturing about 33% of scholarships that require an intended field of study to be eligible to apply. A few others that had good representation were biological and physical sciences, business/management/administration, and trade and industry. Conversely, liberal arts and interdisciplinary studies, English and literature, foreign languages, and area and ethnic studies were all intended fields of study that were not widely represented with available scholarships.
• Join an organization: Approximately 11% of scholarships require that you are apart of some organization to be eligible to apply. The American Legion is the most widely represented organization, representing over 25% of the scholarships that require an affiliation with an organization. The American Legion is for current or past active duty military personnel, but there eligibility can be extended within divisions of the Legion for sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, wives, and other family members.
• Look at what your current state of residence or the state where you are looking to attend college has to offer: Fifty percent of the Scholarships listed in the College Potential Calculator are based on the state you currently reside in or the state you intend to attend College in. You can cut the time down on your scholarship search by simply looking at scholarships registered in your state. For instance, Googling, “Scholarships in Texas,” will yield an alphabetical list of all scholarships for Texas residents.

A fun feature of the College Potential Calculator is the ability to look at more than just one college. In fact, you can allow the calculator to find your potential to get into up to 20 colleges at a time based on the cost of the college, location of the college, national rank of the college, or your best chances. For instance, let’s look at a high school student who lives on the east coast but wants to go to school on the west coast. All she has to do is simply enter in the city and state on the west coast she wants to be near, her SAT or ACT scores and GPA, and then click calculate. Based on her preference, she can sort the results of the 20 colleges by the least expensive colleges near the area, the closest colleges to the area, the colleges with the highest national rank in the area, or by the colleges she has the best chances of getting accepted to near the area.

The College Potential Calculator is designed for students, parents, and counselors who want to gauge a student’s potential to get into any one college or obtain a scholarship based on their GPA, SAT or ACT score. The tool looks at the past 1 – 5 years of admission statistics for 3,600 universities and approximately 2,000 scholarships. You can watch a quick demo of the College Potential Calculator on WhatisAverage.com.

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You can contact Dan Coomes, President, The College Potential Calculator at
Dan.Coomes@WhatisAverage.com and follow him on Twitter at @wisavg.